Ticked

This Land Is Their Land

Reports From a Divided Nation

Barbara Ehrenreich

Metropolitan Books: 252 pp., $24

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LISTEN carefully. Over the din of Fox News commentary, AM radio shock talk, Cialis ads and pandering presidential candidates, you can hear it: the sound of Barbara Ehrenreich screaming. “Wake up!” she’s shouting at the working people of America. “The people you trust are lying to you. All of them.”

From where Ehrenreich sits -- no ivory tower but not quite ground level, either -- the good people of America are being gouged, duped and distracted; trapped on airplanes during their hard-earned summer vacations, scared away from demanding better wages, lured to vote for the party of the rich for the sake of phony moral values. We’re being made to buy Disney dolls and self-help books, force-fed unsatisfying low-fat diets -- and look! We’re all poorer and fatter than ever. And we wouldn’t know a decent healthcare plan if it cracked our heads open.

In her new book, “This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation,” Ehrenreich compiles published commentary and blog posts into a volume that might be read as a crescendoing howl against American injustice early in the second millennium. With burning wit and righteousness, Ehrenreich critiques politicians, evangelicals, corporations (Wal-Mart, Circuit City, the Gap, Target) and the odd movie (“Miami Vice”) with a scorn that abates only when she’s talking about her granddaughters, whom she invokes to remind MSNBC analyst Kate O’Beirne that she is far from the family-hating feminist O’Beirne makes her out to be.

Given the wretched state of U.S. healthcare, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the looming threat to reproductive rights and the nattering mendacity that issues from the mouths of cable-news pundits, it’s hard to deny Ehrenreich her outrage. Hardly any contemporary social critic is so entertaining in her darkly satirical fury, or so clear. Neither of the current presidential candidates has matched Ehrenreich in driving home the healthcare problem as she does in one short essay (written shortly after President Bush vetoed a bill expanding state health insurance coverage for children) titled “Children Deserve Veterinary Care Too.” Citing a few cases in which a vet could have saved uninsured children’s lives, she proposes a $33-per-month pet-insurance policy for toddlers, insisting that it’s a good investment: “In many ways,” she writes, “children stack up well compared with common pets. They can shed real tears, like Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.”

This is Ehrenreich’s column-and-blog-writer voice. Of the 15 books she’s written or co-written over the last two decades -- including one for which she lived the low-wage life for a year, “Nickel and Dimed” -- few spill over with the effervescent sarcasm that runs through “This Land Is Their Land.” Some, such as “The Hearts of Men,” are more distanced and nuanced in their grievances; others, such as the delightful “Dancing in the Streets,” are hardly bitter at all, except about the Protestants who demonized dancing. By contrast, here she bristles about everything: those high-carb, low-fat diets (which she believes contributed to the “financial shenanigans of the last few years”); women who deny their past abortions; the high cost of college. “Welcome to Fleece U,” she writes in “Freshpersons, Welcome to Debt!” “If we have succeeded in our educational mission, you will be a first-rate debtor, capable of making minimum monthly payments much of the time.”

Occasionally, Ehrenreich’s rage seems misplaced: Are Disney’s Princess dolls really poisoning children’s minds, or might princess stories make sturdy fables that transcend politics? Is a lack of dietary fat really what’s turning CEOs hypoglycemic and greedy? And was it necessary to speculate on New York Times health columnist Jane Brody’s dress size and brag about her own? (Note to Barbara: I’m a size 6 too, and, like Jane, I butter my toast sparingly.)

But Ehrenreich writes with a charm that makes you forgive the hyperbole: She is, after all, trying to get your attention. You can sense in her fulminations over self-help books and workplace bullies a progressive voice yearning to be heard by the people who need her most -- the ones who don’t read the Nation or Harper’s or even the New York Times but get their ideas from such populist firebrands as Michelle Malkin and Lou Dobbs, who would never in a million years suggest that the white working people of America join hands with the “illegals” they’ve been taught to scapegoat and rise up against exploitation.

It’s the lament of the liberal social critic: The people most likely to read your words find in them only commiseration. But Ehrenreich has a solution. In “The Faith Factor,” she bemoans the Democrats’ cession of the moral high ground to “the party that brought us Guantanamo.” America’s left could do worse, she suggests, than adopt the strategy of the early Christians: “Theirs is the story of how a steadfast and heroic moral minority undermined the world’s greatest empire and eventually came to power,” she writes. After so many years of toiling at the keyboard for the sake of social justice, Ehrenreich may be craving a similar conquest.